Pet Shop Boys: Super review – punchy, urgent and laser bright

4 /
5 stars
4 out of 5 stars.

From smart studies of anxious millennials to compassionate portraits of unlikable politicians, the songs on the duo’s second album with producer Stuart Price are a celebration of camaraderie through music

Still curious after all the years … Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
Photograph: Pelle Crépin

If you were to attempt to dream up a quintessential Pet Shop Boys song, it’s unlikely you could improve on Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe’s current single, The Pop Kids. It’s the tale of two friends who met at university in London in the early 1990s, went clubbing together and found the life they craved as the kids who “loved the pop hits and quoted the best bits”. Recalling the big city adventures of the Pet Shop Boys’ 1986 debut album, Please, the affectionate life lessons of their 1990 single Being Boring and the rhythms of early 90s house music, it’s a moving celebration of camaraderie through music. As such, it’s the perfect introduction to Super, the duo’s second album with the producer Stuart Price following the revitalising record Electric in 2013. (They have accurately described it as: “Electric, but more so.”)

The characters in The Pop Kids remember “telling everyone we knew that rock was overrated”. The Pet Shop Boys emerged in an era when pop was often regarded as rock’s frivolous younger sibling. They countered by insisting that not only was pop as important as rock, it was better. Tennant, a former Smash Hits journalist who loved Joni Mitchell and Hi-NRG producer Bobby O alike, brought a unique sensibility to synthpop: curious, compassionate and playfully intellectual. Thirty years later, the school of criticism known as “poptimism” has won – no serious critic thinks Rihanna is less worthy of analysis than the Red Hot Chili Peppers – but the idea of overtly intelligent chart music has fared less well. You only have to contrast the portrait of the artist as a young man in the Pet Shop Boys’ 1987 chart-topper It’s a Sin with the one in Lukas Graham’s recent No 1 song 7 Years. One is a symphonic disco bildungsroman exploding with Catholic guilt; the other sounds like a bank advert.

Even in the 80s, however, the Pet Shop Boys were unusual, telling four-minute stories with precision and empathy. They’re still doing it on Super, with Twenty-something, a tense, reggaeton-influenced study of ambitious, anxious millennials “in a decadent city at a time of greed”, and the remarkable song The Dictator Decides. This isn’t the first time Tennant has written about disliked politicians as actual human beings – I Get Along in 2002 retold Tony Blair’s sacking of Peter Mandelson as a Sinatra-quoting breakup song – but he outdoes himself here. The narrator is a weary, self-loathing, hereditary tyrant who’s quietly begging for a revolution to rescue him from a job he never chose and can’t handle – and if the people choose to execute him in the process, well, he wouldn’t blame them. “If you get rid of me we can all be free,” Tennant fatalistically concludes.

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If Super has a weakness, then it’s a surfeit of songs with scant or non-existent lyrics and a dearth of the ballads that are often the stealth highlights of Pet Shop Boys albums, aside from the Kraftwerkian Sad Robot World (not a metaphor for online culture; it’s actually about robots). Lowe has said they are saving some slow songs for the third in a triptych of Price-produced electronic albums, just as they began making Electric with the extrovert tracks they had withheld from 2012’s sombre Elysium. The duo are currently more interested in exploring facets of their sound than in presenting the full picture, a focus that makes for a record that’s more consistent than one like 2006’s panoramic Fundamental, but a little thinner.

On its own terms, Super succeeds brilliantly. Price, who has also done great work for Madonna and New Order, is adept at highlighting the core values of pop veterans while adding a contemporary edge. Every track sounds punchy, urgent and laser bright. Inner Sanctum was produced with Berlin’s cavernous Berghain venue in mind, and you can tell. Undertow and the up-all-night war cry Burn are gleaming technopop juggernauts.

In tandem with Electric, Super makes listeners who heard Elysium as a farewell rather than just another stop along the way feel rather foolish for thinking that age (Tennant is 61, Lowe 56) could wither the Pet Shop Boys’ commitment to pop music. You wonder, in fact, if these two albums with Price were partly inspired by a desire to rebut the idea that dancefloor pop is something you outgrow, a narrative arc they probably find trite and depressing. It may be a coincidence that the sentiments of the album-closer Into Thin Air – one friend or lover trying to persuade another to flee a bad situation and start afresh somewhere new – echo those of Two Divided Zero, the first song on their first album, but it’s certainly telling. Escapism, adventure, reinvention, companionship: the qualities that drew the Pet Shop Boys into pop in the first place entrance them still. They remain, now and forever, the pop kids.